Currently, many new real estate development projects are emerging to meet the demand for new construction. Developers of real estate, especially the larger developments, go through extensive efforts and research in creating a marketing and branding strategy designed to maximize sales. As part of that marketing campaign, typically a website is created. The Internet has emerged as a critical piece of any developer's marketing strategy, and remains the best source for information on a development. Over 70% of new potential buyers look first on the Internet for their next purchase. New development websites are frequently some of the most cutting edge websites on the Internet today. Indeed, the developer's website can be one of the most effective sales tools with regards to new or pre-construction sales.
New developments typically have an onsite or dedicated in-house sales staff that writes the contracts on the properties for sale. Real estate agents, working for outside brokerages, are typically encouraged to refer clients to this in-house sales staff. If a new construction unit is sold when an outside agent has referred the client, typically a “co-broke” relationship exists, in which the in-house staff makes a commission and the referring real estate agent receives the same amount of commission as the in-house sales staff. Therefore, on a business level, there is typically no conflict of interest between outside agents and the development sales staff.
Although the developer's website is an effective sales tool, and although there is typically no conflict of interest between the developer's in-house staff and referring real estate agents, currently real estate agents are reluctant to add a link from their website to any new development website, for fear of losing leads. Indeed, this fear of losing leads is well-founded, because once a visitor clicks on a link to a development to learn more about it, they will typically communicate with the contact person listed on that site and bypass the realtor who supplied the lead. The real estate agent has effectively been bypassed and most likely has lost a potential commission. Thus, the real estate agent fears sending potential clients to the new development's website because of the very real potential for the visitor to contact the new development's sales office directly. To date, no alternatives have been able to address the loss of the visitor to the new developer.
As a result of the above scenario, realtors and brokerages that would like to work with a certain development project, have the perfect clientele to sell on the project, and want to show their clients information about the project, can completely miss an opportunity to utilize the most valuable informational tool for the development: the development website.
The present invention provides a system and method to solve this problem and provides other benefits, as will become clearer to those skilled in the art from the foregoing description.